After millions of people had personal data taken by Google during Street View mapping, without permission, it has turned out that the person responsible for the hack is a Google engineer. Google had declined to identify the engineer, though the identity is now known.

Along with Google, the Federal Communication Commission had also declined to name the engineer. The FCC.had recently closed its 17-month inquiry on Street View, having found that Google obstructed the investigation, but hadn't broken the law.

The engineer - referred to as Engineer Doe by the FCC - didn't talk by citing his Fifth Amendment. As a result, the agency said it was unable to resolve all the issues.

However, a former state investigator inquiring into Street View has named Engineer Doe - Marius Milner. Milner is a programmer with a background in telecommunications. He is "highly regarded" in the field of Wi-Fi networking and is essential to the project, the New York Times reported.

Milner described himself, on his LinkedIn page, as a "hacker" and under the Specialties category, said, "I know more than I want to know about Wi-Fi."

The former state investigator also spoke on the condition Milner cannot be identified because he didn't speak. A footnote in the full text of the FCC's report said Google told it the name of "Engineer Doe" because it "had disclosed his name to state investigators" on Dec. 17, 2010.

Milner didn't answer any questions last Sunday, April 29, and referred to his lawyer Martha Boersch who represents him.

Boersch also declined to comment the following day, April 30.

Street View was designed to photograph streets in the world, which could then be viewed from Google Maps, while gaining information about local wireless networks to improve location-based searches.

The FCC said a Google engineer included code to collect unencrypted data sent from homes by computers - which included e-mails and Internet searches - as the Street View cars drove by. The illegal data collection ran from 2007 to 2010.

Google's release of a complete version of the FCC's report on Saturday, April 28, reveals the engineer told at least one superior and seven engineers on the data collection.

Before working at Google from 2003, Milner worked at Lucent Technologies and Avaya - both communications and computer networking companies.

(reported by Jonathan Charles, edited by Dave Clark)